Nicholas Smyth: Objection Five?http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=872#p7909
Hi Jack, <br><br>Nice paper!. However, if I may, I wasn&#39;t convinced by your response to objection five. The objection, I take it, is that the intuitions you are marshaling about incoherence derive from a non-moral standpoint, that is, they are intuitions that arise when one is doing metaethics and not when one is actually moralizing.&nbsp; And it seems undeniable that Moore paradoxical sentences are straightforwardly bizarre when uttered by persons in the context of actual moralizing (just imagine actually having the relevant conversation). At the outset of your paper, you correctly note that expressivism is a theory about actual moralizing, so it seems like this is one objection to which you should be very sensitive.&nbsp; You respond:<br><br>
<blockquote><p>This is not really a
rejection of C3, but a rejection of C1, since it admits that it is not always
the case that affective or conative attitudes are expressed by moral
assertions. If non-cognitive mental states are only sometimes expressed by
moral assertions, then the claim that what we&#39;re really up to with our moral
talk is expressing our attitudes towards various actions, persons, and such has
to be seriously tempered. In addition, we need an explanation of when such
attitudes are expressed and when they are not. </p></blockquote>
<br>The important thing here is to note that for an expressivist, your sentences aren&#39;t really moral assertions, because they are delivered in a philosophy paper and not in the course of ordinary moralizing. Blackburn in particular takes Wittgenstein very seriously here: take words out of their language-games and you deprive them of their sense.&nbsp; It is still true that noncognitive mental states are always expressed by moral assertions, but you have to understand what &quot;moral assertion&quot; actually is. For any responsible expressivist, it cannot be a context-free sentence that appears in a philosophy paper, spoken by no one.<br><br>Anyway, I&#39;d love to hear more about what you think about this objection, as I take it to be a very powerful challenege to the way expressivist theories are commonly tested.&nbsp; Surely, if we are interested in what ordinary moral discourse is like, we must investigate that discourse itself, and not discourse that maintains theoretical distance from it.<br><br>Cheers,<br><br>Nick<br><br>&nbsp;<br><br>Nicholas Smyth2013-09-12http://philpapers.org/post/7909Erwin Sonderegger: distinction world and culturehttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=864#p7891
Hallo<br><br>I am interested in further arguments pro&nbsp; and in objections contra my distinction between world and culture.<br><br>Sincerely Erwin Sonderegger<br>Erwin Sonderegger2013-08-23http://philpapers.org/post/7891Andrew Russo: Second draft of the earlier paperhttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=854#p7858
All comments are welcome!Andrew Russo2013-07-25http://philpapers.org/post/7858Andrew Russo: Early Draft of paper: All comments are most welcomehttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=847#p7816
Here&#39;s the place to be critical!&nbsp; Anything that can help me develop this argument is much appreciated.&nbsp; This is something I develop a bit in my dissertation and the hope is to develop it more here and eventually have something worthy of publication.Andrew Russo2013-06-14http://philpapers.org/post/7816Nicholas Smyth: Pluralism?http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=845#p7811
Hi Professor Demetriou,
<br><br>I&#39;ve just read the draft of your
paper, and I really enjoyed it, especially the bits where you complicate the
somewhat simplistic just-so cultural-evolutionary story provided by Ross and
Nisbett.&nbsp; One rarely sees such deep engagement with actual anthropological data in
moral-philosophical papers about disagreement, and I think your reflections here
are a valuable contribution to this literature.
<br>
<br>However, I have a question about the &quot;pluralism&quot; that is
on offer, which is &quot;a view
urging the moral correctness of &nbsp;multiple
and mutually irreducible comprehensive ethical &nbsp;outlooks , each suited to &nbsp;its own dimension &nbsp;of social life .&quot;&nbsp; A familiar worry emerges
here, which is that you are covertly drawing on a kind of monism which serves to make each of the competing moral systems appear attractive.&nbsp; The trouble begins with the word &quot;suited&quot;: what does it mean to say that a moral outlook is &quot;suited&quot; to a certain dimension of social life?&nbsp; Presumably, for each dimension, there are more and less suitable outlooks, and one wonders what standard is doing the ranking, here.<br><br>The same sort of problem appears here:<br><br>&quot;1) Why should we
accept obligations of justice? &nbsp;Perhaps: because
people do, need to, and &nbsp;wish to
cooperate for mutual material benefit , and the principles of justice tell us
how to do so &nbsp;correctly and how to
maintain institutions governing such cooperation... (2)
why should we accept obligations
of honor? Because people do, need to, and wish to compete for prestige, and
honor tells us how to do so correctly
and how to maintain institutions governing such competitions.&quot;<br><br>Now , these claims only follow if there is some general, outlook-independent principle like: &quot;People ought to accept outlooks which correctly enable them to do what they need and wish to do.&quot;&nbsp; This sounds something like a general, higher-prder principle that governs the acceptance of both systems...hence there is no &quot;pluralism&quot;.&nbsp; The problem is exacerbated, I think, by your use of the word &quot;correct&quot; here: if this word is meant to point to a kind of ethical correctness, then there most certainly must be general moral truths that govern just how people are to &quot;correctly&quot; (1) co-operate and (2) compete for prestige.&nbsp; <br><br>So, my question is this: in noting that there is a convergence between the two outlooks and in giving justificatory reasons for this convergence, you&#39;re inviting the monist-realist to ask difficult questions about the source of those justificatory reasons.&nbsp; I suspect that you&#39;ve encountered this sort of problem before, but I do wonder what you think about it.&nbsp; Regards,<br><br>&nbsp;
NickNicholas Smyth2013-06-11http://philpapers.org/post/7811Richard Yetter Chappell: Blog responsehttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=819#p7704
For anyone interested, I&#39;ve written up a brief critique of this paper at <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2013/03/moral-supervenience.html">Philosophy, et cetera</a>.Richard Yetter Chappell2013-03-25http://philpapers.org/post/7704Mark Sloan: Supporting Kitcher's Revolutionary Reasoning Inversion in Ethics with Better Sciencehttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=793#p7433
<p>I am delighted that someone of Kitcher&#39;s ability has tackled
the meta-ethical implications of understanding morality as an evolutionary
adaptation. Further, Christine Clavien has advanced that good cause by
providing an inspiringly insightful and clear review of important implications
of his work.&nbsp; </p>
<p>However, the science of the matter actually supports a much
stronger hypothesis than Kitcher&#39;s &quot;morality evolved to overcome altruism
failures&quot;.That stronger hypothesis may have different meta-ethical
implications.</p>
<p>Relevant criteria for scientific truth regarding morality as
an evolutionary adaptation Include explanatory power for descriptive facts and
puzzles, no contradiction with known facts, simplicity, and integration with
the rest of science. By these criteria, a superior hypothesis can be stated as &quot;morality
overcomes a universal cooperation-exploitation dilemma by motivating or
advocating altruistic cooperation strategies&quot;. That is, morality is composed of
assemblies of biological and cultural evolutionary adaptations selected for by synergistic
benefits of altruistic cooperation in groups (where altruistic cooperation and the
cooperation-exploitation dilemma is as explained by the game theorist Herb
Gintis).</p>
<p>Biological evolution implemented these altruistic
cooperation strategies in our biology that underlies 1) our moral emotions such
as empathy and loyalty that motivate altruism, 2) guilt that punishes us when
we do &#39;bad&#39; things, 3) indignation that motivates punishment of others when
they do &#39;bad&#39; things, 4) an emotional concern for our reputations, and 5) the
remarkable biology underlying our malleable moral intuitions that determine
when and with what intensity our moral emotions are triggered. </p>
<p>Note that all altruistic cooperation strategies require punishment
of poor cooperators - people whose actions reduce the benefits of cooperation
in groups. Guilt, indignation, and concern for our reputations are as important
as altruism and loyalty in maintaining moral behavior in groups. </p>
<p>Cultural evolution implemented these altruistic cooperation
strategies in enforced norms such as the Golden Rule (indirect reciprocity in
its Christian version), &quot;Do not steal, lie or murder!&quot;, &quot;Risk injury and death
to defend your group!&quot;, &quot;Obey the King!&quot;, &#39;Greek&#39; virtues that emphasize leadership
and &#39;Christian&#39; virtues that emphasize obedience, and even circumcision and
prohibitions against eating pigs or hair cutting that serve as markers of
membership and commitment to a cooperative in-group. Enforcement was implemented
by means such as culturally approved collective group disapproval, reputation
damage, &#39;honor&#39; codes concerning retribution, and rule of law.</p>
<p>So, contrary to Kitcher, ethical practice is revealed to be much
more than &quot;a moving phenomenon intrinsically bound to our evolving biology and
culture&quot;. It is revealed to be intrinsically bound to altruistic cooperation
strategies that are as cross-species universal and timeless as their mathematics.
In other words, ethical practice is intrinsically bound to altruistic
cooperation strategies that solve a universal cooperation-exploitation dilemma
that was present before the fusion fires of the first star lit, and will be
still be universal when the last star dies. </p>
<p>Of course, these universal strategies for increasing the
benefits of cooperation in groups are silent on what &quot;benefits&quot; might be moral
or immoral. So ethical practice still is a &quot;moving phenomena&quot; but regarding only
the ends of moral behavior and the most effective biological and cultural
heuristics for altruistic cooperation strategies. </p>
<p>The meta-ethical implications of what I see as this better
supported hypothesis are beyond my limited knowledge of philosophy. But I encourage
people with that expertise to consider such hypotheses that are more solidly
supported than Kitcher&#39;s simple claim &quot;morality evolved to overcome altruism
failures&quot;.</p>Mark Sloan2012-11-12http://philpapers.org/post/7433John Altmann: A commentary on Solipsism?http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=770#p7182
Excellent paper first and foremost Mr. MacLeod! As I was reading your thoughts on plurality and the nature of the individual conscious, it made me think of the ideal of Solipsism. For those who don&#39;t know, Solipsism is defined as: The view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. Would you say that your case for a plurality of consciousness &quot;immediately present.&quot; defeats the ideal of a Solipsistic Philosophy?&nbsp;John Altmann2012-08-08http://philpapers.org/post/7182Richard Yetter Chappell: Blog response on philosophyetc.nethttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=689#p6166
I couldn&#39;t find Tim&#39;s email so am instead posting here a link to my critical discussion of his paper (which may also be of interest to other readers):<br><a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2011/08/moral-judgments-2dism-and-attitudinal.html">Moral Judgments, 2Dism, and Attitudinal Commitments</a>.<br><br><br>Cheers,<br>Richard<br>Richard Yetter Chappell2011-09-10http://philpapers.org/post/6166Alexandre Losev: Some facts in perspectivehttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=658#p5719
Recently I started reading Ronald Giere&#39;s <em>Scientific perspectivism</em> but it turned out to be a demanding task: I became bogged in Chapter 2 and havent been able to go much farther. In a philosophy book one expects down to earth examples to bring some clarity about but here, rather the obverse, they turn out to be the problem.<br><br>Chapter 2 is entirely devoted to Color vision, which is presented in the first sentence (p.17) as &quot;the best exemplar I know for the kind of perspectivism that characterizes modern science.&quot; And on the next page (18) we are told: &quot;The fact that hues have a circular rather than linear structure means that there is no simple linear relationship between wavelength and color&quot;.<br><br>As I get it &quot;circular structure&quot; means that we percieve colors in a limited range and anything beyond is black.But should we say that&nbsp; a sound dissolving in low frequency rumble is at the same time an inaudible piercing screech? Our field of vision is also limited, so&nbsp; it might be said to be circular and&nbsp; perhaps we should expect things that disappearing on the right side to reappear at the left? Rather, we admit that not all light is visible (&#39;colored&#39;) and conveniently distinguish &#39;infrared&#39; from &#39;ultraviolet&#39;, allowing Wavelength to have values from 0 to infinity.<br>There is no color, Giere claims on p.33, that something &quot;is really, that is objectively&quot;. But he could have spared us the trouble of pondering this by starting with the the example mentioned briefly in the last paragraph of the chapter: getting to the proverbial tree-falling-in-the-forest he states that<br>p40 &quot;Sounds, however, are produced by the[se] pressure waves only if there is the right kind of perceiver in the vicinity.&quot; Of course this is a different perspective, even if it easily appears as a twist on the word meanings. <br>Meanwhile he has managed to introduced another misunderstanding. According to modern physics textbooks light is emitted from atoms when electrons jump from one orbit to another and its wavelength depends solely on the energy difference between these electronic states. Giere however avoids mentioning this and claims that light depends on molecular structure of surfaces and so a rose and its color photograph should be of the same substance if they are to have the &#39;same&#39; color. There is not a word that the same energy difference can occur in different kinds of atoms which would emit light with the same color.<br><br>As far as I have read it Giere is not puzzled that different perspectives can be combined in a non contradictory whole but rather by the fact of their plurality. Emphsising his own exotic view on things he discusses cartography and claims that &quot;Every projection gives a different perspective on the Earth’s surface. But these projections are all incompatible.&quot; The common usage being that if a such procedure leads to an incompatible result we would not call it a projection. Apparently his bizzare claim rests on the fact that no mapping of a higher dimensional continuum to a lower dimensional one can be both smooth and univoque. However what he manages&nbsp; to say (p.80) is something about &quot;projecting the surfaceof a three-dimensional sphere onto two dimensions&quot;, ignoring the usage to describe a surface (his word) as twodimensional.<br><br>If one could accept such views on trivial matters perhaps the theorizing would look impressive, but it is certainly not the case for me .Alexandre Losev2011-04-18http://philpapers.org/post/5719Gilbert Albans: What about Idealism?http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=642#p5447
There is a curious statement made by Philonous to Hylas in George Berkeley&#39;s <em>Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous </em>in the third dialogue. <br><br>Here is what Philonous says: &quot;The question between the materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that person, but whether they have an absolute existence, distinct from being perceived by God, and exterior to all minds.&quot;<br><br>I think we can modify this quote a little to say: The question between a materialist and an idealist is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that human being, but whether have an existence outside of <strong>a</strong> mind. <br><br>The quote itself grants that there is a world exterior to the human mind that is either perceiving it, and this over looks the problem of an external world. However, why do we hold that there is a world that exists independent of a nonhuman mind?<br><br>Why should we believe that there is a world that exists independent of a mind instead of the world that exists is dependent on a mind? <br><br>I would agree that neither position is verifiable or refutable, and both accommodate our observations. However, we do know that minds exists and perceive things, so why should be believe that these things that we perceive (nonhuman objects like trees and etc) do exist outside of another mind? <br>Gilbert Albans2011-02-27http://philpapers.org/post/5447MetaphysicsJohn R Tracy: the core of relationalism is...http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=564#p4515
<p>I have not yet read the full version of Joseph&#39;s book, but I can tell this ties directly into my own theoretical perspectives involving assessment, learning, behavior, and consciousness. To me, as laid out in my Education PhD dissertation at Colorado State University (2005), the core essence of being (reality) is <em><strong>individual and collective consciousness interacting and interconnecting with consciousness at every level of existence (seen and unseen) as an ongoing here and now creative process.</strong></em>&quot; Thus, primary learning is intuitive and secondary learning is rational-objective. <br><br>Rational objective, is by my definition, <em><strong>fixtional thinking</strong></em> that allows one to &quot;fix&quot; or position relations &quot;as if&quot; they were separate and disconnected in a cause and effect relationship and in which they must of necessity substantiate existence&nbsp;&quot;as if&quot; it were true. It entails a sort of machine mentality of parts, in which the parts equals the whole and the whole is what the parts can do by working together. While this has some value and allows for manipulation, it is also estranging of the relational. <br><br>Intuitive learning is&nbsp;experiential at the level of interacting with consciousness. This can be and is done at multiple levels (often simultaneously) and in every level of consciousness. The learning is sensory in as much as it is secured by means of&nbsp;multiple sensory probes and receptors of our consciousness. Interpretation of this sensory experience is also a function of consciousness. <br><br>Unfortunately, the current global society is dominated by the rational objective, which disqualifies and generally rejects the intuitive. It teaches that &quot;information&quot; of a substantive nature as what is valid. The relational perceptual lens is thus skewed and interacts &quot;as if all were separate and disconnected in a cause and effect reality.&quot;&nbsp;<br><br>What do you think?&nbsp;<strong> <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=eMI2PLj2b3sC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Relationalism:+A+Theory+of+Being+%282009%29.&lr=">An Essay on Ontology</a>&lt;?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = &quot;urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office&quot; /&gt;</strong></p>John R Tracy2010-08-06http://philpapers.org/post/4515Gregory Minissale: Higher order thoughts and arthttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=541#p3969
We have many framing devices in the arts, and one thing that is consistent in their use is a&nbsp;metacognitive process which they seem to stimulate. We see the contents of a picture, and while we are occupied with processing these details we might come across another picture inside it, or we might see an artist painting a picture (as we do in Velazquez&#39;s Las Meninas);&nbsp;or there might be a&nbsp;mirror in&nbsp;the depicted space, all of these framing devices&nbsp;allow us to step out of our current thought process, and become aware of&nbsp;it, or self aware of our viewing. How&nbsp;fair is it&nbsp;to say that&nbsp;visual experience can be ordered in the form of HOTs as framing devices in the visual field, or that HOTs can be visualised in this way?&nbsp;<br>Gregory Minissale2010-05-27http://philpapers.org/post/3969Jason Streitfeld: On the sense of variables in propositional functionshttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=504#p3357
In &quot;On Denoting&quot; (1905), Russell presents a theory of
denotation which
relies on the notion of a <em>variable</em>.&nbsp; Russell says very little
about variables in this paper.&nbsp; He says only that they are
&quot;fundamental,&quot;
and that they are &quot;essentially and wholly undetermined&quot; constituents of
propositional functions.&nbsp; I think I understand the role of this notion
in Russell&#39;s theory, and why Russell says what he does about it,&nbsp; He
appeals to non-denoting elements in propositions in order to avoid having
to interpret &quot;a=b&quot; as &quot;a=a.&quot;&nbsp; By using variables, he can claim that no
elements in a propositional function serve the role of the denoting
phrase.&nbsp; For example, in the fully explicit presentation of &quot;Scott is the author of <em>Waverley</em>,&quot; we do not find anything for which we could substitute the phrase &quot;the author of <em>Waverley</em>.&quot;&nbsp; The meaning of the denoting phrase is only found when we
interpret the proposition as a whole, and cannot be found in any of its
parts.&nbsp; <br><br>My problem is, I don&#39;t know what it means to say that a proposition contains undetermined elements.&nbsp; Russellian propositions are regarded either as structured sequences of objects and
properties, or as possible worlds.&nbsp; Fregean propositions are thoughts about objects and properties, or ways of denoting the True and the False.&nbsp; None of these views seems welcoming of
undetermined elements, unless we say that some thoughts and/or objects are undetermined, or that some thoughts and/or objects can have undetermined properties, or that some worlds have undetermined components.&nbsp; The notion of variables looks problematic to me, though I am admittedly new to Russell&#39;s paper and the topic in general.<br><br>I would appreciate any thoughts,
or pointers to where this issue has been discussed.<br><br>Thanks,<br><br>Jason<br>March 22, 2010<br>Jason Streitfeld2010-03-24http://philpapers.org/post/3357Thomas Kemp: a good deductive argument?http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=481#p2930
Hi, I&#39;m writing an essay on whether George Bealer gives a good deductive argument for the existence of universals in this paper. I was wondering if any one has any thoughts on this?<br>Thanks<br>Thomas Kemp2010-02-11http://philpapers.org/post/2930Marcello Pucciarelli: Can we make room for developmental constraints?http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=440#p2561
Design explanations&nbsp;are explanations, or maybe just arguments, addressing questions
about why certain organisms have some traits instead of others. For
example, since tetrapods have lungs but&nbsp;don&#39;t have gills, it seems
reasonable to ask why. Design explanations attempt to answer such
questions by looking at functional dependencies and integration between different
traits in the same organism.
For example, we might start by looking at the functional requirements for respiration in a large
organism living on land, invoke the relevant laws from physics or chemistry or
biology, and show that having gills would make the organism less
viable.&nbsp;<br><br>
Wouters proposes a schema for design explanations. In my words:<br>
<br>
1) Specify the organism&#39;s properties and conditions of existence.<br>
2) Assert that trait T possessed by the organism is more useful than alternative trait T&#39;.<br>
3) Provide an explanation of 2).<br>
<br>
I see 2) as an undue limitation. Contrasting alternative traits is a very important strategy but we could make it more flexible. An additional strategy for design
explanations could be: <br>
<br>
A) Answer a question of the form: &quot;why no members of class X possess trait T&#39;?&quot;<br>
B) Replace trait T&#39; with T and show that the answer is not valid anymore.<br>
<br>
Following this strategy we could keep Wouters&#39;s schema by replacing 2) with:<br>
2&#39;) Assert that trait T&#39; is either &quot;impossible&quot; or would make the organism less viable.<br>Here, &quot;less viable&quot; could also be construed as a disruptive effect on the organism&#39;s integration (see below for more), and does not necessarily involve comparison with another trait.&nbsp;<br>
<br>
Why should we want to make this change? Let me remind that we are not trying to devise a new kind of explanation, but to capture what biologists do when they give explanations. I&#39;m sympathetic to Wouters&#39;s claim that design explanation &quot;can
be understood from a mechanistic point of view as revealing the
constraints on what mechanisms can be alive&quot;. So I wonder why we
shouldn&#39;t try to make design explanations more relevant to the
discussion on biological constraints.<br>
<br>
Constraints operate at the level of developmental mechanisms and
prevent the occurrence of certain types of variations. For example,
while there is variation in the number of segments of centipedes, no
centipede has an even number of segments. This kind of constraint does
not arise from the fact that organisms possessing a certain trait are
less viable, but presumably from the &quot;logic&quot; imposed by some mechanism
over the process of segment formation during development. For example
(just a speculation), one could imagine a first &quot;unconstrained&quot; process
of segment formation along the main axis, then a single division of
each existing segment into two, except for the &quot;head&quot; segment.<br>
<br>
I said &quot;biological constraints&quot;, but a better way to frame the
discussion would be in terms of a taxonomy of processes operating at
the level of phenotypic evolution.
To keep things short I will refer to a paper by Giuseppe Fusco, where
in addition to developmental constraints the notion of &quot;internal
selection&quot; is defined and defended. Briefly, internal selection affects
the viability of an organism at the level of integration. The main
difference with natural selection is that the effects of the former
&quot;remain approximately constant across a wide range of environments&quot;
(Fusco e#FUSHMP).<br>
<br>
The change I am advocating would make it possible to include into a
design explanation those specific (i.e., less generic) constraints that
may prevent the production of alternative forms. My point is that these
alternative &quot;impossible&quot; forms are already part of the explananda
of evo-devo research and can be assumed to have a mechanistic
explanation, so they would fit in well with an enlarged schema for design explanation.&nbsp;<br>
<br><br>Marcello Pucciarelli2009-12-24http://philpapers.org/post/2561Rodrigo Cid: Reductive Approach to Possible Worldshttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=432#p2453
When we say that &quot;P&quot; is possible iff there is a possible world where &quot;P&quot; is true, we can continue and say that there is a possible world where &quot;P&quot; is true iff &quot;A&quot; is true, and &quot;A&quot; is not something about a non-actual possible world. Such an approach would allow us to use the vocabulary of possible worlds, while sustaining an agnostic or an anti-realist position about the the existence of non-actual possible worlds. Can such a reductive approach to possible worlds solve the problem of
ontological commitmentt to the existence of non-actual possible worlds? And what do you think that &quot;A&quot; must be as non-actual possible worlds dont get implicated?Rodrigo Cid2009-12-17http://philpapers.org/post/2453Robin Linderborg Robin: Two-Dimensional Semanticshttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=350#p1707
I am currently working on a small paper on Frank Jackson&#39;s <em>From Metaphysics to Ethics</em>, which has gotten me into the discussion of two-dimensional semantics. <br><br>According to this approach, there are two ways a term or a sentence can be said to apply or to be true at different possible worlds. The first way one can consider what some term applies to in a possible world, is by supposing that that possible world is the actual world. The second way one can consider what some term applies to in a possible world, is by treating the world as a counterfactual world. Jackson calls a term&#39;s extension, in the first sense, the term&#39;s A-extension; and in the second sense, the term&#39;s C-extension. Likewise, the intension of a term in a world considered as actual, is called the A-intension of the term; and the intension of a term in a world considered as counterfactual is called the C-intension of the term. David Chalmers has summarized (or, at least, mentioned someone else&#39;s summary) these two ways of thinking about possibilites in the following way: in the first case, one “considers a possibility as actual”, and in the second case, one “considers a possibility as counterfactual“. <br><br>To use Jackson&#39;s own example, consider the term “water” (we accept Kripke&#39;s view that terms like “water” are rigid designators). In a possible world considered as actual, the A-extension of water is whatever substance that plays the “watery role” in that world, be that H20, XYZ or whatever. In a possible world considered as counterfactual, what the term “water” denotes is H20 – its C-extension is only H20 – since “water” is a rigid designator. <br><br>My question is: Suppose <em>w</em> is the actual world, and that the substance that plays the watery role in <em>w</em> is XYZ. Then, of course, the A-extension of &quot;water&quot; in <em>w</em> is XYZ. But what about the C-extension of &quot;water&quot;, under the supposition that <em>w</em> is the actual world? Do we take as a premise that <em>w</em> is the actual world, and that &quot;water&quot; in <em>w</em> denotes XYZ, and conclude that in every counterfactual world (that is, every other world than <em>w</em>), &quot;water&quot; denotes XYZ? I have a strong feeling I&#39;m missing something here, but I&#39;m not sure what it is.<br>
Robin Linderborg Robin2009-09-27http://philpapers.org/post/1707MetaphysicsCarlos M. Muñoz-Suárez: Artifacts and individuations conditionshttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=328#p1546
<p>On the Individuation of Artifacts.</p><p>Artifacts
are concrete particulars with certain structure and function. The proper
function of an artifact is a property of it; of course, this isn’t a perceptual
property but a functional one; e.g. . Functional
properties of artifacts are intrinsically associated with their design, i.e.,
with their structure. Functional properties and structural properties are constitutive
of artifacts; there’s no artifacts lacking proper functions and/or structure.
Imagine an object looking like a book but that, actually, is a chest. In one
sense, this is a book that cannot be read; in other sense, this is a chest that
looks likes a book. If we take into account its functional properties we are
facing a chest; if we take into account its external visual perceptual
properties (appearance) we are facing a book. How should we call this object? ‘book’
or ‘chest’? </p>
<p>If
we know structural properties of such an object we could find that this is a
chest looking (visually) like a book. To call this object ‘book’ depends on our
ignorance with respect to the complete catalogue of structural properties,
i.e., those that make it be a chest (i.e. those that make possible that we can
perform certain proper function with it). Constitutive properties of artifacts
(i.e. those with which we individuate them <em>as
artifacts</em> and no merely <em>as objects</em>)
are structural and functional ones.</p>
<p>Furthermore,
we individuate an object, <em>a</em>,<em> </em>by specifying their properties, <em>F, G, H</em>, <em>J</em>…. Therefore, if we find that some of their structural, say <em>F </em>and <em>H</em>, properties are man-made properties (e.g. shapes, volumes, union
of parts etc.), then, we will ascribe a inferred functions to <em>a</em>. &nbsp;Two options: (i) If <em>a </em>is taken to be a token falling in the extension of the sortal predicate
‘artifact’, then, <em>F</em>, <em>G</em>, <em>J
</em>and <em>H</em> are individuating
properties of <em>a</em>; (ii) if <em>a </em>is taken to be the extension of the
sortal predicate ‘animal’, then, <em>F </em>and
<em>H</em> are not individuating properties. What
is it <em>a</em>? It depends on how we have
fixed the reference of our sortal terms. Here we are not individuating <em>a</em>, rather we are specifying the extension
of a given sortal. </p>
<p>We
don’t need words to perceptually recognize <em>a</em>.
In general, the way <em>a </em>looks is (under
normal conditions) how <em>a </em>actually is.
So, we sensorily individuate objects (e.g. their borders, surfaces, parts and
so on) and we know the way they look. This is another way to know what is it <em>a</em>. In exploring the properties of <em>a </em>we can find man-made properties or
natural properties (<em>F, G, J </em>and<em> H</em>). From this view, if <em>F, G, J </em>and<em> H</em> contribute to individuate <em>a</em>
then they are all constitutive properties of this concrete particular. We know
what a particular concrete is without words. Sortal predicates don’t
individuate concrete particular entities, but they pick out sets of properties that
must be instantiated to falling in their extension.</p>
<p>In
conclusion, what a particular concrete entity is depends, primarily, on sensory
knowledge. Which sortal predicate can we use to refer to it depends on the
nature of their properties. Return to the chest/book example. Such object has volumetric,
visual, tactile etc. properties depending on our accurate (complete) perceptual
monitoring. If monitoring is accurate, thus, I can use the sortal predicate ‘artifact’
but if our perceptual monitoring is merely visual, thus, I can use the sortal
predicate ‘book’. Concrete particular entities fall under the extension of a sortal
term depending on how we perceptually monitor them.</p><p>** Editor&#39;s note: subject line has been de-capitalized **</p><p></p>Carlos M. Muñoz-Suárez2009-08-16http://philpapers.org/post/1546MetaphysicsHugh Chandler: Parfit's Reasons and Personshttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=302#p1422
<br>I wrote this paper back shortly after the second edition of Parfit’s book was published – 1985 or thereabouts. No one wanted to my paper. I was told that there were already too many papers on the topic. These days, it would have fewer competitors. In any case, I think it is still worth reading (for those interested in the topic).&nbsp; Shameless vanity, no doubt.Hugh Chandler2009-07-09http://philpapers.org/post/1422Alastair Wilson: MLE seminar commentshttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=265#p1097
Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/<br>...<br><p>The paper we discussed this week is <a href="http://www-rcf.usc.edu/%7Emaschroe/research/Schroeder%20Expressivist%20Negation.pdf">here</a> and my (very short) handout is <a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emle/handouts/tt09wk5-schroeder.pdf">here</a>.</p>
<p>Schroeder is offering more of a general structure for an
expressivist account than a fully-worked out one, and one of the points
he’s fairly vague on is what descriptive predicate should typically
follow the ‘is for’ attitude. For the purposes of the paper, he adopts
a proposal of Gibbard’s, which analyses disapproval (a technical term
for the expressivist) in terms of being for blaming for; so the idea is
that ‘Jon thinks murder is wrong’ should be rendered as ‘Jon is for
blaming for murdering’.</p>
<p>(Note that we can’t just adopt the ‘is for’ proposal without any
descriptive predicate: ‘is for the non-occurrence of’ because this
collapses two readings we want to keep distinct; the non-occurrence of
not-murdering is the same as the occurrence of murdering, while not
blaming for not murdering is not the same as blaming for murdering.)</p>
<p>Taken literally, it looks like there are counterexamples to the
analysis in terms of blaming. There are surely cases where we think
something is wrong, but are against blaming anyone for it, perhaps
because we think that apportioning blame at all would be unhelpful.
Similarly, the suggestion that we should use ‘avoiding’ falls foul of
cases where we think something is wrong, but are not for avoiding it,
because all of the alternatives are worse.</p>
<p>Of course, these observations rest on ordinary usage of ‘blame’ and
‘avoid’. If ‘blaming for’ is a technical term with a stipulative
meaning, like ‘disapproval’ and ‘tolerance’ have traditionally been for
the expressivist, then perhaps the problem can be nullified. So I’d
suggest resurrecting the old Blackburnian terminology of ‘booing’ and
‘hooraying’, and saying that we have tacit knowledge of the meaning of
these terms in virtue of our competence with moral discourse.</p>
<p>We can take either of these as primitive, and define the other in
terms of it; for example, booing x is equivalent to hooraying not-x,
and hooraying y is equivalent to booing not-y. The advantage of this is
that it doesn’t seem to be vulnerable to the same kinds of intuitive
counterexamples as any of the candidate descriptive predicates that
Schroeder mentions. The disadvantage is that we then require two
primitive notions in our expressivist semantic, rather than one (the
being for relation).</p>
<p>Another thought we had was that the ‘being for’ proposal seems to
lose some of the distinctive thought behind expressivism, that moral
judgments consist in some attitude to the act whose morality is called
into question. On Schroeder’s proposal given in terms of blaming for,
thinking murdering is wrong doesn’t involve having some attitude to
murdering; rather, it involves having some attitude to blaming for
murdering. This allows us to ask for an explanation of why someone has
their particular attitude to blaming for murdering. For Schroeder’s
kind of expressivist, no explanation is possible; but for a moral
realist, an explanation is easily available – it’s because murdering is
wrong.</p>
<p>The worry, then, its that the demand on Schroeder’s expressivist for
explanation of why someone has some particular attitude to blaming for
x seems rather more pressing than the demand on the traditional
expressivist to explain why they have some attitude to x itself. This
can be thought of as a dilemma for the expressivists – either they have
a working semantic theory without sufficient motivation, or they have a
well-motivated theory which cannot explain logical validity for moral
arguments. Schroeder, who is no expressivist himself, would presumably
be happy with this dilemma.</p>
<p>One nice thing we noticed about the proposed analysis is that it
disambiguates apparently distinct claims which the normal expressivist
view runs together. Where a traditional expressivist would say ‘Jon
strongly disapproves of murdering’, Schroeder’s expressivist can
disambiguate this as either ‘Jon is strongly for blaming for murder’
or&nbsp; ‘Jon is for strongly blaming for murder’.</p>
<br>Alastair Wilson2009-05-27http://philpapers.org/post/1097Alastair Wilson: MLE seminar comments on Weathersonhttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=256#p1020
<p>Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/</p><p>...</p><p>Handout <a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emle/handouts/tt09wk3-weatherson.pdf">here</a>, original paper <a href="http://brian.weatherson.org/counterexamples.pdf">here</a>.</p>
<p>In this paper Brian Weatherson argues that we can in principle make
substantive discoveries in theoretical philosophy which correct
mistakes in our pre-theoretic beliefs about some subject matter. The
crux of the argument is that, according to the right (eg the Lewisian)
theory about meaning, the referents of our theoretical terms are often
stable over small variations in use. In some domain where there are few
very natural candidate referents to which we might plausibly be
interpreted as referring , even relatively systematic false beliefs can
be tolerated before use is changed enough for reference to change. Thus
it can be the case that the correct response to an intuitive
counterexample is to reject certain kinds of intuitions in order to
preserve overall theoretical unity and simplicity.</p>
<p>The example looked at in detail is the Gettier counterexamples to
the JTB theory of knowledge. Weatherson isn’t committed to the JTB
theory – he just thinks that it isn’t straight-away refuted by the
Gettier examples. Maybe the theoretical benefits obtained from a simple
and elegant epistemological theory outweighs the need to capture
intuitions in certain types of case.</p>
<p>The part of the argument I found most puzzling was the part where
Weatherson responds to the objection that the JTB theorist must mean
something other than we do by ‘knows’. First he argues for the Lewisian
theory of meaning – all well and good. But the Lewisian theory of
meaning <em>per se</em> is quite compatible with the view that a tribe
speaking a language in which the meaning of ‘knows’ was given by the
JTB theory would be speaking a different language from ours. This would
depend on the details of how use is balanced against simplicity.
Indeed, this view seems intuitively plausible – surely such a wide
difference in use would constitute a change in meaning?</p>
<p>In explaining away this intuition, Weatherson goes on to argue that
the natural properties in the vicinity of our use of ‘knows’ are
extremely scarce. But talk of the distribution of natural properties
here presents a puzzle. What does it mean to say ‘there are just no
reasonably natural properties in the vicinity of our disposition to use
‘knows’.&#39;? It seems like to make sense of this sort of talk, we need
some kind of measure over global-disposition-to-use space with which to
compare distances between properties. But nobody has a clue how to
explicate such a measure; until we do, talk about scarceness or
abundance of natural properties in certain domains has to be taken as
merely suggestive and metaphorical.</p>
<p>Luckily, the dialectic does not require talk of distribution of
properties to be made precise. The resources needed to stave off the
‘meaning-change’ objection to the JTB theory are more straightforward.
We require at the very least that there must be no property which is a)
as natural or more natural than the property of having a JTB <em>and </em>b)
as well-matched or better-matched than the property of having a JTB to
our use of the term ‘knows’. But we also need that there be no property
which, while doing less well on one criterion than JTB, does so much
better on the other criterion that it is the best referent for ‘knows’.</p>
<p>Weatherson’s argument that there is no such property goes via ‘the
failure of the ‘analysis of knowledge’ merry-go-round to stop.’ I take
it the thought is that despite our best efforts, we have failed to find
any really good candidate analysis. Maybe this does lend support to the
idea that there is no extremely simple and natural property which
corresponds exactly to our use of the term ‘knows’. But nonetheless
there are several properties, like the one picked out by a causal
theory of knowledge, which seem to do better at capturing our
intuitions about Gettier cases. They go wrong elsewhere; but nothing
Weatherson says gives us any reason to think that these post-Gettier
ramified theories of knowledge don’t do better overall than the JTB
account.</p>
<p>Weatherson’s defence of the JTB theory would be in more trouble
still if we could appeal to the Lewisian thought that conjoining
natural properties leads to no loss of naturalness. Then theories which
consist of the JTB account plus some other necessary conditions given
in terms of very natural properties would turn out at least as natural
as the JTB account. Such theories also tend to match usage better than
the JTB theory (that was the point of introducing the extra necessary
conditions, after all) so it looks like they should be strictly
preferable. Then we’d have to argue that the reduced simplicity of the
more complex theory is such a cost that it counteracts these
considerations.&nbsp; We’re then a long way from the ‘failure of the
merry-go-round to stop’ line of argument.</p>
<p>However, the closing section of the paper is relevant here. For
reasons which seem to me good ones, Weatherson argues against the idea
that naturalness is always conferred on a conjunctive property by its
conjuncts. If this is right, then we can take the ‘merry-go-round’ idea
in a different direction. All of the proposed additions to the JTB
theory involve conjoining extra properties onto the property of being a
JTB; if conjoining extra properties can make a property less natural
(for example in cases where there are multiple ways of satisfying the
conjunctive property), then maybe all of the proposed additions to the
JTB theory do score significantly lower on naturalness, enough to
offset their better match with use. However, it&#39;s unclear if Weatherson would want to go this way, as he doubts that the failure of naturalness to distribute across conjunction generalizes from the JTB property to all the proposed analyses of knowledge.</p>
<p>In this connection, I wasn’t convinced by the thought that the
failure of naturalness to transferred to conjunctions from their
conjuncts told in favour of the metaphysical thesis that naturalness is
primitive. It seems quite compatible with the universals account that
the properties of being F and being G are co-intensive with genuine
universals, but the property of being-F-and-G is not co-intensive with
a genuine universals. All we need to do is to reject conjunctive
universals (or maybe just reject their genuineness.) And this is
something we might want to do in any case. A similar response is
available in the case of the primitive resemblance view. There can
easily be cases in which the F’s resemble one another, and the G’s
resemble one another, but the F-and-G’s do not all bear primitive
resemblance relations to one another. All we need is that there is no
single resemblance relation which holds among all the F-and-G’s, only
two different resemblance relations, one holding among all the F’s and
the other holding among all the G’s. Given that the resemblance
relation is primitive, I can’t see any objection to stipulating that it
works this way.</p>Alastair Wilson2009-05-21http://philpapers.org/post/1020Alastair Wilson: MLE seminar comments on Rodriguez-Pereyrahttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=246#p940
<p>Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/<br>...<br><br>My handout for the seminar yesterday is <a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emle/handouts/Gonzalo%20-%20truthmaking%20entailment%20and%20the%20conjunction%20thesis%20handout.pdf">here</a> – the paper we were discussing is <a href="http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/115/460/957?ijkey=YwKLrM9jCGvqdnv&keytype=ref%20">here</a>
(subscription required). We were glad to have Cian Dorr drop in for the
discussion – he really livened up what might have turned into an hour
and a half of Gonzalo teaching everybody about how truthmakers work!</p>
<p>My take on the contribution which Gonzalo’s paper makes to the
big-picture debate over truthmakers is as follows. Conceptions of
truthmaking which appeal only to entailment, or to necessitation, get
things importantly wrong. The way to fix up the account of truthmaking
is to appeal to a metaphysical ‘in virtue of’ relation. Truthmaking is
not mere sufficiency for the truth of a proposition. However, this
undermines much of the appeal that truthmaker theory had for some of
its original proponents – it does not, after all, allow us to avoid
primitive metaphysical ‘grounding’ or ‘dependence’ relations. Still, it
does not make truthmaker theory altogether useless – it just undermines
the idea that it is a panacea for all ills in foundational metaphysics.</p>
<p>With those general thoughts out of the way, here are a few more straightforward conclusions to come out of the discussion:</p>
<p>- The view that Gonzalo settles on has fairly strong commitments to
propositions. In the notation used in the paper, </p><p>, </p><p>, … all come out as distinct
propositions. This is because they can be made true in different ways –
take P to be ‘there is a chair’. Then&nbsp; my chair and your chair can make
true </p><p> jointly. My chair and your chair can make true
</p><p> separately, but they can’t make it true jointly. Gonzalo
wants to underwrite this with a view of propositions as internally
structured entities.</p>
<p>- However, </p><p>, </p><p>, </p><p>… do not have
to be taken as distinct propositions for the account to go through.
This suggests a minimalist account of propositions compatible with
Gonzalo’s truthmaker account as follows:&nbsp; propositions are identical
iff, necessarily, they are made true by the same entities. So
</p><p>, </p><p>, etc, come out as different names for a single
proposition, while </p><p>, </p><p>, </p><p>… come out as distinct propositions. Why might we be attracted to
this minimalist view of propositions? We might think we have a better
grip on existence, and on the ‘in virtue of’ relation, than we do of
that of a proposition. This view holds the promise of an explanatory
account of what a proposition is in terms only of truthmaking and
necessity.</p>
<p>- However, there are several pretty major problems with the
minimalist view. One is that, if we take the truthmaker for a=a to be a
itself, then the <a> comes out as the same as ,
making a a necessary existent. Unless you’re Tim Williamson, this is a
bad result. Another problem is that all necessary falsehoods would come
out either as the same null proposition, or as not propositions at all
– none of them have any truthmakers. I’m still tempted by the view
though, and would be interested to hear any further objections to it.</a></p>Alastair Wilson2009-05-15http://philpapers.org/post/940Alastair Wilson: MLE seminar comments on Stanleyhttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=245#p939
Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/<br>...<br><br>The presentation is <a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emle/handouts/week3-stanley.pdf">here</a>. Some thoughts which came out of the discussion:
<p>- If Stanley’s argument in section 3 that gradability doesn’t imply
context-sensitivity is sound, then it renders section 2 rather
superfluous, as that is devoted to arguing that ‘knows’ is not gradable.</p>
<p>- But even if Stanley’s argument in section 3 is sound, his argument
against contextualism still looks pretty weak. At most he’s shown that
‘knows’ isn’t contextual <em>in virtue of&nbsp; ‘justified’ being gradable</em>.
But it’s a perfectly consistent position to say that the
context-sensitivity of knowledge is of a distinctive kind, different
from the context-sensitivity of gradable adjectives. Plausibly,
Lewisian contextualism is of this sort.</p>
<p>- Stanley’s argument in section 3 doesn’t look sound to me. It rests
strongly on the supposed counterexample of a gradable and non-context
sensitive predicate ‘ taller than six feet’. This is meant to be
gradable because you can be slightly taller than six feet, or much
taller than six feet. But I don’t see that this is enough to make it
gradable. Consider the infelicity of ‘very taller than six feet’. My
view is that you’re either taller than six feet, or you aren’t. No
grades involved. Of course, you can be taller than six feet <em>by a large amount</em>, but this doesn’t make you taller than six feet <em>to a greater degree</em> than someone who is just over the threshold.</p>
<p>- Similar comments apply to ‘possible’, which Stanley takes to be
gradable. It’s true that we have the idiom ‘very possible that x’. But
we can’t say ‘x is possibler than y’. My view is that ‘probable’ is
gradable, but ‘possible’ isn’t.</p>
<p>- It’s not clear what Stanley is using as an individuation-criterion
for discourses. He claims that it is plausible that context can be
shifted within a sentence for individual terms (eg ‘that butterfly is
large, but that elephant isn’t large’). But consider sentences like the
following: ‘I know that I have hands, because there is no possible
scenario in which I don’t – except of course for a really sceptical
one, which is of course a possibility we can’t rule out – so maybe in
fact I don’t know that I have hands.’ It looks like the standards of
the discourse have changed mid-sentence, which undermines the contrast
Stanley wants to draw between the context-sensitivity of gradable
adjectives and the context-sensitivity of ‘knows’.</p>Alastair Wilson2009-05-15http://philpapers.org/post/939Alastair Wilson: MLE seminar comments on Williamshttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=244#p938
<p>Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/<br><br>...<br><br>The handout for this week is <a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emle/handouts/week4-williams.pdf">here</a>, the original paper is <a href="http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/%7Ephljrgw/wip/REVISEDcounterfactualsandchance.pdf">here</a>.</p>
<p>I found this a particularly interesting paper. I’m in firm agreement
with the main gist of Williams’ view- that the notion of typicality is
in principle better adapted to deal with chancy similarity than the
notion of ‘non-remarkableness’. That said, we found plenty of potential
pressure points.</p>
<p>- Firstly, I’m not sure that quantum mechanics really has as
wide-reaching consequences as is assumed in the paper. Depending on
your response to the measurement problem, it could be that outcomes
such as plates flying off sideways are not genuine quantum
possibilities after all, because the low-amplitude branches are in some
way ‘lost in the noise’. Although I think this issue is worth further
investigation, I don’t think it’s critical to the debate between
Williams, Hawthorne, and Lewis. Their worries can be raised about
considerably less unlikely events – in fact, we can restrict
consideration just to sequences of coin tosses without significant cost.</p>
<p>- One thought I had about the original ‘Similarity’ proposal – if we
read ‘laws’ not always as fundamental microphysical laws, but
(depending on context) various kinds of more emergent laws, we could
save the proposal without having to introduce quasi-miracles or
typicality. A plate flying off sideways may or may not be a violation
of quantum-mechanical laws, but it is certainly a violation of the
Newtonian laws which hold to a good degree of approximation at the
macroscopic level. And maybe these Newtonian laws are the salient laws
for consideration of the counterfactual. Similarly with counterfactuals
like ‘if I drop this icecube into that mug of hot tea, the icecube will
melt’. We don’t even need to go to QM to get counterexamples to this;
statistical mechanics describes certain highly-unlikely scenarios where
the molecular impacts conspire to prevent melting. But if the salient
laws are thermodynamic laws, then the cube <em>must</em> melt. This suggestion is in the spirit of the proposal about deterministic chance I discuss <a href="http://mrogblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/deterministic-chance/">here</a>.</p>
<p>- One serious option that Williams doesn’t seem to exclude is a
contextualism about ‘remarkableness’. This would involve events being
classified as remarkable or not taking into account the centred world
in which they occur. So a string of 100 heads in a row when flipping a
fair coin is remarkable taken by itself, but not when we take into
account that it is embedded within a string of a trillion coin flips.
If we flip a trillion times, we could reasonably expect a string of 100
heads to occur somewhere.</p>
<p>This suggestion seems to ameliorate all of the problems Williams
raises for ‘Similarity*’. The monkey producing the dissertation will
not be remarkable in the context of worlds where the chances were
arranged such that it had a 20% chance of producing one. The problem of
the abundance of quasi-miracles is defused by noting that in the
context of a long and varied future which is likely to contain various
individually unlikely coincidences, particular individual coincidences
will no longer count as remarkable. The remarkable subpattern problem
can similarly be treated as not remarkable when taken in context of a
very long pattern which overall is not particularly remarkable.</p>
<p>How different from the typicality account is this ‘contextualized
remarkableness’ account? I’m inclined to say ‘not much’. However, it
remains to be seen how the context-shifting would work out in detail –
perhaps this kind of account might lead to failures of Agglomeration.
It seems to be a big merit of the typicality account that Agglomeration
is validated.</p>
<p>- We’d all have liked more detail in the typicality proposal, with
particular reference to how the class of relevant natural properties is
to be characterized, and which mathematical definition of randomness is
to be used. Another concern was what a ’small, localised atypicality’
might be (as appealed to in point 3 of Chancy Similarity*) – wasn’t
typicality explicitly a global notion?</p>
<p>- Despite all this, we thought the typicality account a promising
one and liked the way it could be applied both to chancy
counterfactuals and to Elga’s problem of fit.</p>Alastair Wilson2009-05-15http://philpapers.org/post/938Alastair Wilson: MLE seminar comments on Fitelsonhttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=243#p937
<p>Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/</p><p>...</p><p>You can find the handout for this week <a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emle/handouts/week5-fitelson.pdf">here</a>.
I thought this was a really good paper, and we didn’t find all that
much to criticise in it. It was a bit frustrating not to hear more
about Fitelson’s positive story, in particular about the bridge
principle that he would endorse instead of the various versions of RTE
that he criticises. He’s clearly saving the juicy stuff for his book.</p>
<p>In particular, I find it hard to see how he plans to steer a middle
ground between the Carnap/Williamson-style ‘a priori priors’ version of
objective bayesianism, and the subjective bayesian approach. My naive
take on the matter is that you either think that there’s a unique
correct set of priors or you don’t. Maybe these priors aren’t a priori
knowable (<em>contra </em>the Carnap/Williamson approach), although it
seems that a position like this would be committed to complete
epistemic rationality being in principle unattainable.</p>
<p>I wasn’t sure how strongly Fitelson meant to criticise the
subjective Bayesian’s RTE’. Although as it stands the principle is
useless, presumbly the subjective Bayesian wants to find a principle
which is extensionally equivalent to RTE’ but which is not useless,
because it picks out K’ in a different and more illuminating way.
Fitelson gives no argument that this will prove difficult.</p>
<p>Gonzalo pointed out an interesting consequence of Hempel’s confirmation theory – all propositions are equally confirmed <em>simpliciter</em>.
Of course, what we are interested in is confirmation of propositions by
particular other propositions; this just underlines that Hempel’s
confirmation relation is a logical and not an epistemic relation.</p>
<p>Another observation Gonzalo made is that M is trivially false if we
allow for properties like ‘being such that this grass is green’. ‘This
grass is green’ confirms ‘all grass is green’; but obviously statements
like ‘this grass is green and this grass is such that that grass is
blue’ do not confirm ‘all grass is green’, as M says it should.</p>Alastair Wilson2009-05-15http://philpapers.org/post/937Alastair Wilson: MLE seminar comments on Schafferhttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=242#p936
<p>Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/</p><p>...</p><p>This week we discussed <a href="http://rsss.anu.edu.au/%7Eschaffer/papers/TruthCom.pdf">Schaffer’s ‘Truthmaker Commitments’</a>,
which is a critique of a certain view of ontological commitment
associated with Armstrong and with Ross Cameron. It’s worth reading <a href="http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/%7Ephlrpc/Schaffer%20reply.pdf">Cameron’s reply to Schaffer</a> as well. No presentation to put here as yet; but the papers themselves are quite clear and concise. Various thoughts follow:</p>
<p>Gonzalo raised an issue about the notion of ‘implication’ being used
by the quantifier view. If a theory’s ontological commitments are what
it says exists, as Schaffer glosses it, then a theory is committed to
certain entailments of the particular sentences or propositions which
explicitly make it up. But a theory’s commitment should not include
necessary existents, whose existence is entailed by <em>any </em>set
of sentences. Perhaps, though, this is a problem more with this gloss
on the quantifier view than an objection to Quine’s own view.</p>
<p>Schaffer could have said more in defence of the quantifier view
against the ‘linguisticism’ charge. The quantifier view by itself
decides no ontological questions, if correct. All it does is to say how
the true theory is connected with the true ontology. Given the
quantifier view, what our ontology is is determined <em>by which theory is true</em>.
The quantifier view is compatible both with theories on which there are
only particles arranged tablewise, and with theories on which there are
particles arranged tablewise, and there are tables, and the tables are
not identical with any particles or arrangments of particles. So the
quantifier view does not itself determine what exists.</p>
<p>However, even granting this stronger point Schaffer could have made,
I think Cameron can stick with the reply he actually gives. This is
that the objectionable linguisticism is in the thought that the
syntactical structure of the true theory of the world, <em>as expressed in our language</em>,
must mirror the ontological structure of reality. Cameron presumably
thinks that the process of translating the true theory of the world
from Ontologese to English will involve generating some true English
existence-assertions where there were no isomorphic
existence-assertions in Ontologese. I think this claim does move the
debate forward and I’m tempted to agree.</p>
<p>There is another way of responding to this point on behalf of the
quantifier theorist. It is that we should stick with English, but
English analysed in whatever way it takes to get the true underlying
quantificational structure. That is, we could give an analysis of
English according to which it has a quantificational structure exactly
isomorphic to the quantificational structure of Ontologese. Perhaps
higher-order quantification will make this possible for Schaffer;
perhaps, as Gonzalo suggested, we might also have to give up eg the
association between classical first-order individuals and objects. It
looks like the issue between Schaffer and Cameron here is how far we
ought to complicate the semantic and logical structure of English in
our analyses, and how much we should ascribe to quantifier variance.</p>
<p>Gonzalo also pointed out that some mereological nihilists might be
committed to tables even on the truthmaker view. For if they allow
many-one quantification, eg ‘the particles=the table’ then even the
truthmaker view is committed to tables. So the friend of the quantifier
view has a stronger case here than Schaffer realizes.</p>
<p>We thought Cameron’s reply to Schaffer on the ‘denumerably many electrons’ objection was right.</p>
<p>There was more-or-less a consensus that the grounding view of
truthmaking (Tgro) does best of the three accounts Schaffer discusses.
He dismisses the use of Tgro by a truthmaker theorist, saying ‘Tgro
does not concern what there is, but only concerns what is fundamental.’
It seems to me that this can be easily resisted by a truthmaker
theorist, as it is by Cameron.</p>
<p>Schaffer’s dilemma for the truthmaker theorist – if existential
quantification is not generally ontologically committal, it is
mysterious why the specific existential quantification in TNec is
committal – didn’t seem persuasive at all. The truthmaker theorist
claims to have presented arguments for his view; if good, those
arguments are <em>ipso facto </em>good arguments for a distinction
between existential quantification in general and existential
quantification over truthmakers. Given this, horn A of the dilemma
seems to come down to prejudice that there should be no distinction
between types of existential quantification.</p>
<p>Much of the issue between Schaffer and Cameron does seem to come
down to what we should mean by ‘ontological commitment’. They each
offer us clear enough candidate meanings for the phrase – Schaffer
takes it to mean ‘what the theory says exists’ while Cameron proposes
‘the demands that the theory places on ontology’. As Cameron says in
his reply, it would be dogmatic for Schaffer to simply refuse to
recognise a potential distinction here. And once we do recognise the
potential distinction, I think there is a case to be made for both
candidate meanings for ‘ontological commitment’.</p>
<p>One moral we might draw from this is that philosophers have
sometimes been at cross-purposes over a (comparatively new) technical
term. It may have been legitimately used in both senses in the past; if
so, it might be better to drop talk of ontological commitment
altogether. The idea of commitment is still a useful one, for it makes
sense of implied or presupposed existence claims, but perhaps we can
replace the troublesome term ‘ontological commitment’ with a pair like
‘derivative commitments’ and ‘underlying commitments’.</p>Alastair Wilson2009-05-15http://philpapers.org/post/936Alastair Wilson: MLE seminar comments on Dorrhttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=238#p932
Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/<br>...<br><br>This week we discussed Cian Dorr’s ‘There are no abstract objects’, which isn’t currently available online, but is in ‘Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics’. Here’s the <a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emle/handouts/week4-dorr.pdf">handout</a> instead.<br><br>As we had Cian on the spot for this meeting, the discussion mostly took a question-and-answer format. So here are what I recorded of some questions and some answers, with a few that I didn’t get time to ask thrown in at the end. Apologies if my paraphrases of Cian&#39;s answers misrepresent him!<br><br>Q: What about people who would resist the paraphrase strategy (p.37) because they think that counterpossibles are all vacuously true (Williamson takes this line in The Philosophy of Philosophy).<br>A: Nominalism/anti-nominalism are both contingent theses. But even if you think that nominalism is necessary if true, there will be certain kinds of truths like ‘there are possibly some things with a number-like structure’ which can be used to ground the relevant counterfactuals, along the lines of modal structuralism.<br><br>Q: Why require systematicity in our paraphrases?<br>A: Because we want to make straightforward sense of statements which mix different cases, such as ‘there are various different kinds of abstract objects’ – numbers, properties, sets, etc’<br><br>Q: Aren’t tables and numbers in the same boat according to the strategy applied here? What does this do for the nominalist intuition that tables are better known than numbers? How would the world look different if either existed<br>A: Bite the bullet – chairs do not differ from numbers in any interesting way.&nbsp; If they did exist, things would look just the same, but there’s still no good reason for us to suppose they do.<br><br>Q – Is the regress vicious (p.44)?<br>A – Yes, though it’s a little bit unclear why. One possible reason is that if denial of brute necessities is to get us anywhere, we’d better not have circular or regressive accounts of metaphysical primitives. For example, the following analysis does not get rid of brute necessities at any stage:<br>The necessity of ‘All fs are gs’ is explained by ‘to be an f is to be an f1 that is g.’ But why are all f1s gs? This is explained by ‘To be an f1 is to be an f2 that is g’… and so on.<br><br>Q: If we take property essences seriously, Kit Fine style, can we posit an essence of the instantiation relation that rules out pathological cases of instantiation?<br>A: The problematic cases can still be described in purely structural terms, so the problem has not completely gone away.<br><br>Q: Is this fictionalism?<br>A: Not if fictionalism is characterised by the literal falsity of claims about the domain one is fictionalist about.<br><br>Q: Why think that 6a or 7a in the fundamental sense do not analytically entail 6b and 7b in the fundamental sense? Isn’t it just the neo-Fregean project to defend these analytic entailments? What conception of analyticity makes it obvious that the entailment fails? Admittedly, a conception of analyticity which supports the entailment would have to have it analytically false that nothing exists.<br><br>Q:&nbsp; ‘Fundamental way’ – ‘ultimate furniture’ – ‘final analysis’ (p.34) – it seems like there are two ideas mixed up in the motivating metaphors. One is about the ideal science at the end of enquiry – but it’s not at all obvious (to me) that numbers won’t feature in this ideal science, if it’s formulated in the most natural way. Another&nbsp; involves ‘metaphysical explanatoriness’ – in this view, fundamental means something like ‘best trade off between simplicity and metaphysical explanatoriness’.<br><br>Q: Does it make a difference to the Alien Particulars Objection (p.49) whether we are committed to haecceitism?&nbsp; It looks like an anti-haecceitist can’t even express the objection.<br><br>Alastair Wilson2009-05-15http://philpapers.org/post/932Alastair Wilson: MLE seminar comments on Rayohttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=236#p930
<p>Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/</p><p>...</p><p>Agustín Rayo - Ontological Commitment</p><p>Paper <a href="http://web.mit.edu/arayo/www/ontcom.pdf">here</a>; handout <a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emle/handouts/week8-rayo.pdf">here</a>.</p>We struggled to see the exact import of this paper. Cian worried that ‘ontological commitment’ was a philosophical technical term, and that even a really good account of it would still not tell us too much about what really exists. Perhaps the motivation is that Rayo wants to emphasize that the characterization of ontological commitment can be kept apart from Quine’s criterion. Quine’s criterion (to be is to be the value of a variable) has perhaps come to seem constitutive of ontological commitment for some philosophers, which leaves no room for non-Quinean accounts of the ontology of (say) mathematics.<br><br>I wondered about an attempt at explaining demand-talk in terms of necessitation. The obvious account, that the truth of P demands that the world contains F iff necessarily(p → Fs exist), ends up saying that asserting any true proposition commits us to the existence of all necessary existents. So we can try ruling necessary existents out by fiat. Say that the truth of p demands of the world that it contain Fs . Maybe this is equivalent to saying that a) necessarily(p → Fs exist) and b) not necessarily p. The problem with that (supposing numbers are necessary existents), it would come out false that the truth of demands of the world that it contain numbers, and hence that asserting ‘there are numbers’ commits you to numbers. Indeed, it would never be the case that asserting the existence of necessary existents commits you to those necessary existents. I’m not sure what Rayo would think about this. On the one hand, he does want to say that true propositions of mathematics have trivial truth-conditions and hence we can assert them without being committed to numbers. On the other hand, this account of demand-talk would beg the question in favour of the falsity of Quine’s criterion (at least a version of the criterion which is generalized to the language of mathematics) and Rayo seems to be unwilling to build either the truth or falsity of Quine’s criterion into the notion of ontological commitment. So I guess if we want to remain neutral on Quine’s criterion (at least as far as characterising the notion of ontological commitment is concerned) then demand-talk is going to have to remain primitive and unanalysed. But if we take a nominalist line which rejects Quine’s criterion, then we can potentially give a straightforward account of ontological commitment in terms of necessitation.<br><br>Rayo suggests that the ‘demands of the world that it contain Fs’ should be generalized to ‘demands of the totality of everything there is that it contain Fs’ if you are a modal realist. If so, I don’t see why we shouldn’t use this latter formulation in general, since we don’t want an account of ontological commitment to beg any questions about modal ontology.<br><br>We thought that the ‘extrinsic property worry’ for Quine’s criterion was badly characterised by the extrinsic/intrinsic distinction. Not only, as Rayo admits, do not all extrinsic properties cause trouble, but some intrinsic properties like ‘is composite’ also cause trouble. Plausibly, a thing being composite demands of the world that the world contain parts, but ‘for some x, x is composite’ doesn’t need to have parts among the values of its variables.
Alastair Wilson2009-05-15http://philpapers.org/post/930Alastair Wilson: MLE seminar comments on Bealerhttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=235#p929
<p>Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/</p><p>...</p><p>George Bealer - A theory of the a priori</p><br>For the first meeting of Trinity, we discussed George Bealer’s &#39;A theory of the a priori&#39;. The paper is available <a href="http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Egb275/TheoryofAPriori.pdf">here</a>, and the handout is <a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emle/handouts/tt09wk1-bealer.pdf">here</a>.<br><br>Alex lists some objections to Bealer’s view at the end of the handout, all of which we agreed with. Taken together, they seem to significantly undermine the interest of the theory presented in the paper. But here are a few more problems we raised in discussion:<br><br>The anti-Quinean argument seemed unconvincing. It doesn’t have any force against Quineans who either a) reject the normative force of a demand for justification of their epistemological theory or b) think that ‘justification’ and allied concepts will appear in well-developed theories of psychology and sociology. Since I guess that all contemporary Quineans will take one or other of these options, I don’t think Bealer’s argument will worry anyone.<br><br>I worried that there was an uncomfortable methodological circularity in Bealer’s position. He argues for the reliability of intuitions based on certain intuitions about possible scenarios, for example intuitions about whether we determinately possess concepts in the ‘multigon’ case. But someone who rejected the thesis that intuitions are evidence would reject the premises of this argument that intutions are evidence – so the argument is not at all persuasive.<br><br>We wondered exactly what Bealer means by the distinction between analytic and synthetic a priori knowledge. The best reconstruction we could give of it was as follows: analytic a priori knowledge is ‘brute’ knowledge, while synthetic a priori knowledge results from theoretical systematization of the analytic a priori knowledge. But there really isn’t enough on the distinction in this paper to be sure what Bealer intended.<br><br>Finally, I just want to emphasize how weak the conclusion seems to be. Bealer seems to be arguing simply that a priori knowledge is metaphysically possible, for some creature with appropriate cognitive powers and conceptual resources. He says that this gives us reason to think we can have a priori knowledge insofar as we approximate these conditions. But this gives us no reason whatsoever to think that we can in fact have any a priori knowledge. For all Bealer has shown, these conditions cannot even be approximated by creatures in our epistemic situation. The only positive argument that they can seems to be an equivocation on ‘determinate concept-possession’.<br>Alastair Wilson2009-05-15http://philpapers.org/post/929Alastair Wilson: MLE seminar comments on Kmenthttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=234#p928
Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/<br>...<br><br>Boris Kment - Counterfactuals and Explanation<br><br><p>A really interesting paper this week - it can be found <a href="http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/115/458/261">here</a>, and the presentation is <a href="http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emle/handouts/tt09wk2-kment.pdf">here</a>.</p>
<p>Kment&#39;s main proposal is that match of matters of particular fact
should be relevant to closeness of two worlds for the purposes of
evaluating counterfactuals if and only if the matters of fact have the
same explanation in both worlds. Secondarily, he proposes that we
should allow for laws to have exceptions, and hence that all worlds
which share the same laws as ours should be closer to actuality than
any world with different laws.</p>
<p>We quite liked the main proposal, but worried about the
individuation of explanations it relies upon. What are the conditions
for two events to have the same explanation? For example, consider the
counterfactual &#39;if I had tossed the coin five minutes earlier, it would
still have come up heads&#39;. This seems false, but perhaps Kment can
account for this falsity by saying that the coin&#39;s coming up heads in
the various A-worlds would have a different explanation from its
explanation in the actual world, because it would have been caused by a
different event of tossing.</p>
<p>However, what about &#39;if I had tossed the coin one nanosecond
earlier, it would still have come up heads&#39;? Here we were much more
inclined to take the counterfactual as true. Perhaps this difference
goes along which goes along with the intuition that the actual tossing
and the 1-nano-second earlier tossing count as the same event (or as
counterparts according to some very natural counterpart relation),
while the actual tossing and the 5-minute-earlier tossing count as
different events. But if this is the line Kment would want to take,
we&#39;d need to hear more about how it is to work.</p>
<p>Finessing the individuation critera for explanations might also
afford a solution to the problem case (25) which Kment mentions
inconclusively. If the explanation for the lottery&#39;s having the result
it did does not include that phone A was used to make the call, but
just includes that some phone of such-and-such qualitative character
was used to make a call, then we would get the right result that even
if phone B had been used, the result of the lottery would have been the
same. This requires that the explanation of the lottery&#39;s result should
only include qualitative features of certain early-enough explanatory
factors, rather than the whole fully-detailed causal story. That is,
explanations should comprise roughly the minimal information required
to determine their explanandum.</p>
<p>This solution involves dropping the transitivity of explanation
which Kment explicitly assumes - because it is plausible that a call
being made explains the outcome of the lottery, and that the use of
phone A explains that a call was made. However, perhaps dropping
transitivity of explanation is any case desirable. Consider the
well-known counterexample to transitivity of causation - the boulder&#39;s
rolling down the mountain is the cause of the hiker&#39;s ducking, and the
ducking is the cause of his survival, but the boulder&#39;s rolling is not
the cause of survival. The same counterexample seems to work against
transitivity of explanation - the rolling explains the ducking, and the
ducking explains survival, but the rolling does not explain survival.</p>
<p>Another issue we thought about was the degree to which a Humean
could adopt the notion of laws as having exceptions. Clearly it&#39;s
incompatible with Lewis&#39; own theory of laws, according to which the
laws are those true universal generalizations which provide the best
balance of simplicity and strength, but perhaps (as Antony suggested) a
Humean view which took laws to be more like habitual statements would
work. Habituals tolerate exceptions, but they still explain their
instances.</p>
<p>Maria had a potential objection to this approach for the Humean (and
to any view according to which there are restrictions on how many
exceptions are possible before the laws have to be different) - suppose
the number of exceptions in a world are right on the borderline for
it&#39;s having some particular laws. Then the extra small exception needed
to accommodate some antecedent would involve consideration of an
A-world with too many exceptions to have the same laws as the original
world. Then the A-world which, intuitively, is the right one for
evaluating the counterfactual would not come out as closest according
to Kment&#39;s criteria. So it looks like the view might only in fact be
compatible with strong &#39;immanent&#39; views of laws where any arbitrary
number of exceptions are possible while the laws remain the same.</p>
<p>One final thought; it would be possible to hold that exceptions are
possible to all special-scientific laws, but not to the fundamental
laws, if such there be. This seems to fit well with usage: we talk of
the &#39;laws&#39; of statistical mechanics, even though they only hold with
high probability, but we are much less willing to admit that the laws
of fundamental physics might have exceptions. Someone who took this
view of laws could carry over everything Kment says about ordinary
counterfactuals, though might have to say something a little more
counterintuitive about counterfactuals concerning fundamental physics
(perhaps in a deterministic world we would have to count as true &#39;if
this electron had been over here and not over there, the matter
distribution at the big bang would have been different&#39;). However, this
consequence might be ameliorated by the indeterminacy of fundamental
physics.</p><br><br>Alastair Wilson2009-05-15http://philpapers.org/post/928David Bourget: What is a relation?http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=222#p792
I would like a criterion of polyadicity. What jumps to mind is that polyadic properties require more than one object for their instantiation. But that&#39;s not true of some paradigmatic polyadic properties, for example, resemblance (everything resembles itself, so there doesn&#39;t have to be two objects for there to be resemblance). While the fact that a property is instantiated by two objects (together) seems like a sufficient condition for polyadicity, it is not necessary. A few hours of searching through PhilPapers, SEP and Scholar have not revealed anything more promising--have revealed very little discussion of the matter, in fact. <br><br>I have a sense that this is relevant: you can generally have more possible instances of a polyadic property with N objects than you can have instances of monadic properties with the same number of objects, because you get a combinatorial explosion of possible instances. Having said that, I don&#39;t know how to finesse this observation into a criterion of polyadicity. <br><br>PS: One might be tempted to say that a n-ary property is a set of n-tuples. But that seems to be merely a way of modeling n-ary properties. I would like a criterion applicable in the wild.David Bourget2009-04-30http://philpapers.org/post/792MetaphysicsJason Streitfeld: Phenomenal Knowledge and Abilitieshttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=197#p582
Hello,<br><br>I would like to challenge the premise motivating this criticism of the ability hypothesis.<br><br>Sometimes philosophical analyses fail to recognize a crucial distinction.&nbsp; In the case of this paper, the problem is that a distinction is made where none is justified.&nbsp; The distinction drawn is between phenomenal knowledge on the one hand and abilities on the other.&nbsp; Generally regarded as &quot;knowledge of what it is like to experience something,&quot; phenomenal knowledge is the very thing that Hypothesists (to use Mr. Coleman&#39;s term) would classify as a set of abilities.<br><br>Mr. Coleman says:&nbsp; &quot;it is because acquiring the relevant
abilities involves knowing what certain experiences are like that the abilities
elude the classroom—these inherit their elusiveness from the elusiveness of the
phenomenal knowledge they depend upon.&quot; <br><br>I would rather say that acquiring the relevant abilities <em>is </em>learning what certain experiences are like.<br><br>My take on the ability hypothesis may be in some ways novel (I am not aware of any accounts identical to my own), but I think it is in line with the traditional formulation of the position.&nbsp; In my view, phenomenal knowledge (knowing what it is like to be/experience something) is the ability to identify objects of experience.&nbsp; This is the key ability to understand when discussing the many criticisms of physicalism, including the knowledge argument.&nbsp; I would also emphasize that this ability requires some sort of language, even if it is an innate and private proto-language of some sort.&nbsp; Gaining the ability to identify objects of experience does not imply improving our ability to state facts about the objects were are so identifying.&nbsp; <br><br>In the case of Mary, for example, when she leaves the room she may learn to identify colors, but this ability cannot lead her to formulate any substantively novel descriptions of color vision.&nbsp; The reason it cannot is because she has already learned everything there is to say about color vision.&nbsp; Her phenomenal knowledge is not descriptive, which is to say it is not propositional.&nbsp; I.e., it is not in the province of factual information.<br><br>Mr. Coleman suggests that phenomenal knowledge is required <em>before </em>Mary becomes able to identify colors.&nbsp; Claiming that Mary must first know<em> </em>of her color experiences as such before she can identify them is equivalent to claiming that a person cannot learn how to identify something without first knowing how to identify it.&nbsp; Clearly Mary cannot know what it is like to see red <em>before </em>she learns to identify her experience of redness.<br><br>Mr. Coleman&#39;s distinction between phenomenal knowledge and ability appears to be incoherent and in any case lacks motivation.&nbsp; I conclude that Mr. Coleman&#39;s conclusion (that the question of phenomenal knowledge is epistemically prior to the question of abilities) is without warrant.<br><br>It may be that Mr. Coleman has misunderstood the ability hypothesis--perhaps it has not been stated as clearly as it could be.&nbsp; I suggest this possibility because of what he writes here:&nbsp; &quot;This reverses the order of explanatory priority presented to us by the
Hypothesists, on whose account (Mary’s) phenomenal knowledge was to be understood
in terms of having abilities.&quot;<br><br>There is no &quot;order of explanatory priority,&quot; and so there is nothing for Mr. Coleman to reverse.&nbsp; The ability hypothesis does not contend that abilities must be explained <em>in order that </em>phenomenal knowledge might eventually be explained.&nbsp; Rather, it contends that these abilities are all there is to explain.&nbsp; Mr. Coleman&#39;s argument does not counter this position, and so would not seem to pose a threat to the ability hypothesis.<br>Jason Streitfeld2009-04-06http://philpapers.org/post/582Jason Streitfeld: Preserving the Sentence-Statement and Analytic-Synthetic Distinctionshttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=172#p480
Here is a bit of background: I came across Millican&#39;s 1994 paper over the weekend while I was independently researching the philosophy of P.F. Strawson online.&nbsp; (My resources are quite limited, incidentally.)&nbsp; I only last week learned of Strawson via the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy while I was looking for interpretations of the Liar&#39;s Paradox, and I was struck by an apparent similarity between his and my own.&nbsp; My interest in Strawson was furthered when I came across the first four pages of &quot;On Referring,&quot; in which he claims that expressions do not refer, but that people can refer using expressions.&nbsp; (This is the idea Millican indicates as Strawson&#39;s distinction between sentences and statements, where the latter is determined by a sentence&#39;s usage.)&nbsp; This Wittgensteinian notion had occured to me only days earlier, and is what led me to formulate my own arguments about the Liar&#39;s Paradox.&nbsp; In fact, I had written virtually the exact same sentence as Strawson to express t<br>&nbsp;he same idea, though I have yet to find where Strawson explicitly discusses the Liar&#39;s, or any other, paradox.&nbsp; (And by the way, any help on that front would be very much appreciated.)<br><br>That&#39;s the background.&nbsp; My concern with Millican&#39;s paper has to do with his discussion of Quine&#39;s &quot;Necessity Argument&quot; and its relation to analyticity and the sentence-statement distinction.&nbsp; I emailed Professor Millican immediately upon reading his paper on Saturday, though I have no idea if or when I should expect a response.&nbsp; In any case, I don&#39;t see why I shouldn&#39;t post the same question here.<br><br>I wrote the following to Professor Millican:<br><blockquote>You wrote that, on the Strawsonian account, the following two sentences &quot;express the very same statement&quot;:<br><br>1)&nbsp; Nine is greater than seven.<br>2)&nbsp; The number of planets is greater than 7.<br><br>Why should we think these two sentences express the same statement?<br><br>What is expressed by a statement is a matter of how it is used, and either of these two statements can be used in a variety of ways.&nbsp; Even (1) can have a blatantly non-analytic use:&nbsp; for example, to indicate that, while a person likes the number seven, she much prefers nine.&nbsp; Instead of regarding analyticity as a property of sentences, and not statements (as Wolfram appears to do), we are better off regarding it as a kind of usage.&nbsp; And when we assert that sentence (1) does have an analytic use, and that sentece (2) is being used to express the same analytic statement, we only mean that here &quot;the number of planets&quot; is being defined to mean &quot;nine,&quot; and nothing more.&nbsp; It thus appears to me that Quine&#39;s objection fails to take proper account of the sentence-statement distinction.<br></blockquote>I think we can maintain both the sentence-statement distinction and the analytic-synthetic distinction here by recognizing the analyticity is a kind of meaning, and thus a kind of usage.&nbsp; While I am not extremely well-versed in the literature, it appears to me based on Millican&#39;s paper that this possibility did not occur to Quine, Wolfram, or Millican.<br><br>Jason Streitfeld2009-03-10http://philpapers.org/post/480Derek Allan: Describing zombieshttp://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=162#p443
This question has no doubt been asked before but &#39;If there is nothing it is like to be a zombie&#39;, how is it possible to conceive of one - even hypothetically?&nbsp; How can one even say it is &quot;all is
dark inside&quot; or that &quot;A zombie is physically identical to a normal
human being&quot;?, both descriptions depending on known states/characteristics - &#39;darkness&#39; and being &#39;physically identical to a human being&#39;. &nbsp;Derek Allan2009-02-26http://philpapers.org/post/443